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Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic
action and is held together by material forces have drifted far
from God and from the concept of unity; we are not here
addressing them but only such as accept another nature than body
and have some conception of soul.
Soul must be sounded to the depths, understood as an emanation
from Intellectual-Principle and as holding its value by a
Reason-Principle thence infused. Next this Intellect must be
apprehended, an Intellect other than the reasoning faculty known
as the rational principle; with reasoning we are already in the
region of separation and movement: our sciences are
Reason-Principles lodged in soul or mind, having manifestly
acquired their character by the presence in the soul of
Intellectual-Principle, source of all knowing.
Thus we come to see Intellectual-Principle almost as an object of
sense: the Intellectual Kosmos is perceptible as standing above
soul, father to soul: we know Intellectual-Principle as the
motionless, not subject to change, containing, we must think, all
things; a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting
difference. It is not discriminate as are the Reason-Principles,
which can in fact be known one by one: yet its content is not a
confusion; every item stands forth distinctly, just as in a
science the entire content holds as an indivisible and yet each
item is a self-standing verity.
Now a plurality thus concentrated like the Intellectual Kosmos is
close upon The First- and reason certifies its existence as
surely as that of soul- yet, though of higher sovereignty than
soul, it is not The First since it is not a unity, not simplex as
unity, principle over all multiplicity, must be.
Before it there is That which must transcend the noblest of the
things of Being: there must be a prior to this Principle which
aiming towards unity is yet not unity but a thing in unity's
likeness. From this highest it is not sundered; it too is
self-present: so close to the unity, it cannot be articulated:
and yet it is a principle which in some measure has dared
secession.
That awesome Prior, The Unity, is not a being, for so its unity
would be vested in something else: strictly no name is apt to it,
but since name it we must there is a certain rough fitness in
designating it as unity with the understanding that it is not the
unity of some other thing.
Thus it eludes our knowledge, so that the nearer approach to it
is through its offspring, Being: we know it as cause of existence
to Intellectual-Principle, as fount of all that is best, as the
efficacy which, self-perduring and undiminishing, generates all
beings and is not to be counted among these its derivatives, to
all of which it must be prior.
This we can but name The Unity, indicating it to each other by a
designation that points to the concept of its partlessness while
we are in reality striving to bring our own minds to unity. We
are not to think of such unity and partlessness as belong to
point or monad; the veritable unity is the source of all such
quantity which could not exist unless first there existed Being
and Being's Prior: we are not, then, to think in the order of
point and monad but to use these- in their rejection of magnitude
and partition- as symbols for the higher concept.
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